UMRA’s next Armchair Traveler program will be from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, January 14, in the second-floor Community Room of the Highland Park Community Center at 1978 Ford Parkway in St. Paul. The room will be available from 3 p.m. for socializing. Please come early so we can start promptly at 3:15.

For the first half of the program, UMRA members Marilyn Joseph, MD, retired medical director of Boynton Health Service, and Warren Regelmann, MD, former head of pediatric pulmonology at the University, will show some of the unique sights, sounds, and wildlife they experienced cruising and hiking Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2019. The animals of PNG are found nowhere in neighboring Asia because they live on the Australian Plate, which drifted away from the Eurasian Plate, long ago, forming a deep-water barrier known as Wallace's Line, first noted by Alfred Russel Wallace, the explorer and co-formulator with Charles Darwin of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The second half of our program will feature photos and stories from the Great Northern Lights cruise that Claudia Parliament, professor emerita from the Department of Applied Economics, John Welckle, associate professor emeritus from the Department of Education at St. Olaf, and Carol Urness, professor emerita and curator of the James Ford Bell Library, took in 2015 on the good ship Nautica. Their experience took them from Copenhagen northward along the coast of Norway, around North Cape, and then eastward to Murmansk, the Solovetsky Islands, and Archangelsk before turning back for the return voyage to Oslo. 

Signup is limited to 45 so please email Lynn Anderson at [email protected] if you plan to attend.

—Lynn C. Anderson, chair, Armchair Travel Committee